Adding and Editing Music to use in your slideshows.

I love making slideshows of my pictures and adding music. It is really easy to do in Easy Media Creator from Roxio--again, they do not answer emails if you get a bad disk or have trouble with your downloads so caveat emptor.

It is also easy to make excellent slide shows with a program called Microsoft Plus Photo Story. You can find it at this link if you would like to chek it out. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspxI started with this program and only moved to Roxio when I could only put one song on each slideshow. That keeps you pretty limited to about 50 slides and 4 seconds each. Moves along pretty quickly but good to work with just the same. This is a great program for those cat pictures and trip to Lake Mead to feed the carp.

You can even make a slideshow with the Cyberlink Power Director that I talked about in the previous blog. All of these programs have annoying quirks that you discover in working with them. Especially if you are trying to use the Apple iPod version of songs...M4P or Mp4 or whatever. You can easily convert songs to Mp3's and things get a lot easier when you are working with Photo Story, Roxio or Cyberlink programs. These programs have a tendency to just ignore songs in iTunes--they play dumb until you show them an Mp3 file. (Apple is a real pain in the a**--deciding which iPod can play what on which computer--what can synch and what can't...the whole proprietary "this is OUR software that you are using to play on Our iPod using Our iTunes and you will do what we say you can do and when. By the way, you have to update iTunes today or you just won't be able to play your songs until you do.) I do love my iPod even though their iTunes software does not play well with others. For more, see item #10 in this article from PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130994-c,macs/article.html

For those advanced users that want to have a little more freedom with their music (shortening songs for the menu of a dvd, adding a few ditties together as one song or having the music fade in and fade out, do buy the piece of Roxio software called "Sound Edit". I have never had a problem with this little gem of a program. I just used it last night to clean up narration that I had recorded on a slideshow of my trip to South America using Cyberlink Power Director. I had clicks and noise from the microphone I used. By the time I finished working with the narration file, I sounded like a pro...well, I sounded better and clearer and louder on the narration. So, it worked for me. Give it a try. That is one Roxio program that I bought with version 8 and it has been great.

Check it out at http://www.roxio.com/

Also, check out art for sale at http://www.rltphotoartist.com/

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog.


Renee :-)